Isolation
by Fallowdoe
Summary: It's about missing the connection. Finding it again. How Angel, Spike, and Buffy choose to try to do that. Post 'Chosen'. COMPLETE, thanks to those who have read it.
1. Part One

--- Isolation ---  
  
Buffy perched on the low garden wall, smelling the delicate jasmine blooms, listening to the muffled sound of traffic rushing by.  
  
Dusk was settling over the city. Late summer breeze ruffled through her hair, and she watched the leaves running across the flagstones in little, random patterns, pulled about by the wind.  
  
She rapped the delicate heel of her sandal against the wall. The silence of the hundreds of empty hotel rooms all around her filled her with a strange hollowness.  
  
Angel didn't live here anymore. This was an empty, lifeless place. But when she'd called, he wanted to meet her here. She'd almost gotten the sense that he'd not wanted her to see where it was that he lived, now.  
  
Here, it was silent. She tried to avoid silent spaces, it made her think. And thinking too much lead to more pain than she could bear. And it was supposed to be so easy now.  
  
But she felt more alone than ever.  
  
Chosen One. She could understand that grim reality. But who could she be now that she wasn't the One. wasn't anything at all. Just a fighter in an army.  
  
But it wasn't true. She was a sister to a girl who was waiting for her back in Cleveland. Because in the end, that was where she went. She was bound to the mouth of hell, and that was the way it would always be. The First wasn't dead. It was alive everywhere, and it was waiting for another chance. And even if she wasn't the only Chosen, she knew these things better than anyone else ever could.  
  
So she made it her duty, and it was a cold comfort to walk the streets of a city, anonymous. A predator. She'd kill as many vampires as she could, every night. Because it was her role. And even more hers, now, because it had not chosen her Not this time.  
  
She'd chosen it. And she knew that choice was right.  
  
She thought she might be growing up.  
  
She breathed in the smell of the jasmine as the last sun faded from the sky, filling it with the blue haze of streetlamps and headlights, that showed no stars.  
  
"Hey."  
  
She turned. He was standing there, stoic and quiet in the archway. His hands were folded neatly, and he regarded her in distant way.  
  
"Hey," she said, smiling a half smile to him from across the garden space.  
  
And there was silence. She didn't know what to say. So she said what came to mind first.  
  
"I'm sorry."  
  
But it sounded weak.  
  
"I'll survive," he responded, and there was something tired, something frosty in the tone. She glanced up, and saw through his minimalist, quiet words. He was barely holding it together. She had come here to help him, but now she wasn't sure if she could even stop the crumbling of his foundations.  
  
Because it was for Cordelia she came. Because Willow had told her to come- Willow had called her from England, where she had gone to study further, to live, because she told her Cordelia had slipped away after a long, withering sleep.  
  
"I think-I think you should go see Angel, talk to him," Willow had said, "Fred said she thought he was taking it real bad."  
  
She didn't think it could possibly be as bad as Willow had made it sound, when she left. It was Cordelia. After all.  
  
But then she remembered how things change, how people's roles shift so quickly and yet so subtlety that you hardly notice until it's too late.  
  
Angel sat down on the stone, next to her. And suddenly, he was talking. He was being more open with her than he usually would allow himself, and his tone cracked with a strange intensity. He was always afraid of losing control. Now he seemed pushed to the edge, and falling.  
  
"She." he started, "She was-she was. kind. she cared about the world. About life. She laughed-she laughed at so much at things. At my jokes."  
  
Buffy smiled.  
  
"Then she was a Saint."  
  
He smiled back, and she saw the glisten of tears in his eyes. Somehow, the connection between them made it possible for her to feel a bit of what he was feeling. He plucked a sprig of jasmine, turned it in his fingers.  
  
"She was brave. She. she grew. She chose. She really became something beautiful, Buffy. I think you would have liked her."  
  
And she looked into his eyes, and she wasn't thinking about Cordelia at all.  
  
"I think that's true." she whispered, softly.  
  
"She didn't get much of a chance," he said, softly.  
  
And it hit her.  
  
"You loved her." she whispered. But there was no shock or jealousy in the tone. Just a quiet understanding.  
  
He smiled.  
  
"It was easy to, really."  
  
And she touched his shoulder, squeezed it firmly. And they sat in silence for a long time, listening to the traffic, and the night sounds.  
  
And when he spoke, it was with a warm, nostalgic fondness, and his eyes began to dry of those hints of tears.  
  
"I love you," he said, with a quiet, gentle sincerity.  
  
And Buffy's lips curved up just slightly, as she stood to go. For them, this was usually the best time to say goodbye. He reached out and their fingers brushed as she went to the archway.  
  
"Buffy-" he said, swallowing something like pride and looking at her, almost awkwardly.  
  
She turned.  
  
"I'm sorry about-"  
  
But he couldn't say the name. It wouldn't come.  
  
"I'm sorry about what happened."  
  
And something fragile welled in her a moment, before she turned away.  
  
"Thank you," she said, quietly.  
  
---  
  
The crater had filled with ground water, forming a lake of eerie silence in this reclaimed wilderness.  
  
The dross of daily life, rubble strewn out from that focused center point, gathered with algae beneath it all, blue with the shafts of sunlight permeating the unmoving water.  
  
Covered in settled silt and growing things, a sign rested on the lake's floor. It welcomed the void to Sunnydale.  
  
And nothing moved in the cold, airless space.  
  
And in the center, where the man had stood, there was nothing. In the deepest depths of the water, everything had been pulverized to dust with the sheer power of the explosion. And the power was gone, now. Nothing of it seemed to remain.  
  
But beneath this, in the very earth and living rock, something stirred.  
  
A grain of gravel twisted, and beneath it the specks of dust floated upwards, pushing through the dirt, slowly, with twitching, uncertain jerks. And they pulled through, growing in speed and number.  
  
They clouded the dim orb of the sun disk, barely visible above.  
  
And in the flurry, they whirled through the water, gaining a current, rippling in a circle in the shadowed space.  
  
The calm of the sunlit surface began to quiver and shake, although the wind was still.  
  
And below, the grains of dust, near invisible alone began to coalesce into the arching foot bones, speeding about in circles, building on each other and reforming into blood and the veins that cleaved firm to those bones like vines on mortar. And rising up from the ground, the earth formed him like the first man.  
  
His face formed into an elated smile, head thrown back in laughter. And as he formed, his eyes snapped open.  
  
He choked on the water, thrashed back with disoriented shock. Water rushed into his lungs, and they burned with the flow.  
  
He gagged, rolled back and saw the light above.  
  
He remembered the glow, the surrounding of light. It was all that was in his mind, he had been in it-been one with it for so long. He had to get back.  
  
He pulled himself up, the soundless cold weight of the water dulling his senses. The world was the pain in his throat and chest, and struggling to get back to the gentle, gleaming wonder of it.  
  
And suddenly, the word `Effulgent' leapt up in his mind, and he didn't remember what it meant. Something. something connected to a sound. or a feeling. before. Was there something before?  
  
And the cold pressure broke above him and he was surround in gleaming brilliance. It hurt his eyes as he instinctually gasped for the air that felt thin and empty in his lungs.  
  
This wasn't right. this wasn't right.  
  
And when the world came into focus around him-the empty expanse of water and the dry, desolate, brush-strewn shoreside-it all came back. It all came crashing back. Everything.  
  
Faces. Places. Blood.  
  
His limbs went slack with shock, and his face sank beneath the water with sudden speed. It burned in his nostrils and he immediately struggled his way back up.  
  
And he treaded water, alone, staring out into the crater he had made. A tiny figure in the glaring noonday sun.  
  
--- 


	2. Part Two

--- Part Two ---  
  
Dawn was sprawled across the couch, reading a loose paged paperback in the warm glow of the desklight. In the window, the bells she'd strung up rang softly in jingling, random chords, swaying in the Ohio summer breeze.  
  
The walls were bare, white. It wasn't much like a home. She could hear the quite rush of the cars far below her. And she rolled onto her side, sighing, rolling her neck in a loose circle to work out the stiffness. It was almost two in the morning. But she waited up. Sometimes, she was lonely, now. The apartment was silent and empty, and there were no hoards of girls, giggling under sleeping bags in the night.  
  
She talked more and more, recently, about going away. Not too long before she could go to college. Perhaps meet up with Willow, help with the work they all had been so excited to begin. She wasn't sure how Buffy felt about that. It was always hard to tell, with her.  
  
Footfalls echoing down the hall. The jangle of keys at the lock. She was home.  
  
The door opened and her sister's bags skidded across the floor through it. Her sister followed, hair slightly disheveled. She shed her coat and draped it over a chair. She paused in the entry, and inhaled heavily.  
  
"Hi!" Dawn called out cheerfully, head popping up from the sofa. Buffy looked up, startled  
  
"Hey!" she said, pulling that wide smile over her features that she thought masked when she was tired, "You're up late-- uhm, early."  
  
"Had to wait for you to come back," Dawn replied, "And who spends half the weekend on a plane just to spend three hours in Los Angeles anyhow?"  
  
Buffy had wandered into her bedroom. Her clothes flew through the open door, barely missing the laundry basket resting there, waiting patiently for attention.  
  
"Apparently, me."  
  
When she walked out again, she was in comfortably worn sweats, hair pulled back. And she went directly for her weapons bag.  
  
It wasn't like Sunnydale. This was a city, where it'd attract too much attention to carry anything large. Had to stick to small arms, that she could conceal. She strapped a dagger into her sleeve, tucked a stake into her belt.  
  
Dawn's smile crumbled.  
  
"I was kinda hoping we could do a late night cartoon network binge..."  
  
"Dawn I have to do a sweep, I missed yesterday."  
  
"I thought it'd be different... I mean, shouldn't it be different?"  
  
Buffy didn't look at her as she threw the strap of a light bag across her shoulder.  
  
"You really should get some sleep, Dawn."  
  
As she headed out the door, Dawn leapt up. Something sinking was twisting in her gut.  
  
"Stay," Dawn said, a hint of pleading in the tone. But they tried so hard at being casual, the meaning was lost in the delivery.  
  
Buffy sighed, closing the door as she responded.  
  
"Dawnie-- I have to."  
  
And it sent chills through Dawn's spine.  
  
---  
  
Inhale.  
  
Exhale.  
  
It was almost hypnotic.  
  
Breathing.  
  
On the shore of the quiet lake, the man sat naked and breathing, as the light was just beginning to fade in the sky.  
  
Birds gathered in the brush, and insects skipped across the still surface of the water. And he felt like he might be the only one left alive in the world.  
  
The only one left alive.  
  
And that made him laugh. Great gales of giddy laughter, boiling up from within. He had no idea what was so funny, because as far as he saw it, he was screwed.  
  
And he couldn't seem to concentrate. He should be thinking of what he should do next. Try to find Buffy?  
  
Buffy. He hadn't thought of her until just then. There was just too much to take in. What did that mean?  
  
He picked up a smooth stone, skipped it lightly across the water. It made a series of perfect, concentric circles across the surface. And he just tried to breathe.  
  
And he smiled. He must've made quite an impressive explosion, to look at what remained afterwards.  
  
Good on him.  
  
---  
  
Angel was watching the sun set.  
  
He stood inches away from the glass. The mild shine of the surface eflected the room behind him. The desk, the sleek-yet-efficient office furniture. A nice setup.  
  
And he could see directly across the street, see the pale sky peering through the towers, with their shining windows of far more conventional manufacture. He brushed his hand across the surface of his own window. It was cold to the touch. It felt solid.  
  
And he wondered how hard he'd have to hit it before it his fist would shatter through.  
  
---  
  
Darkness settled over the still waters. Cold, damp fog filled the air, obscuring the far side of the lake to him. He realized he was shivering. He was cold. He wasn't sure if he liked it or not, yet.  
  
Wrapping his hands along his forearms, he just continued to stare, trying to cut through the fog. The bats had gone to their nests, that he had been watching feast on flies in the dusk. Flying cartwheels in the air and skimming the surface like mad birds in the evening light.  
  
Everything was muddled, misty. The corners of his vision were indistinct. The shadows were long and impossibly dark. The fog choked the trees, hanging low all around him like a cloak.  
  
He had to do something, but he just wanted to stay here. Maybe he could still wake up and find himself away from all this-- this striving and not knowing. This slow creep of hours, of minutes.  
  
And he heard a quiet sound. Muffled, a fair distance across the lake from him. A splash, the whooping sound of something calling out. Inarticulate, wild sounds.  
  
A white form, stripped, diving into the water. He stood, squinted tried to make them out in the night.  
  
And brilliant, yellow eyes met his. Vampire. Visiting what remained of the hellmouth to swim naked in the cold, summer night.  
  
He couldn't see, but he was sure it was smiling.  
  
---  
  
Angel had killed a girl, once, who looked a bit like Cordelia. Long ago. She'd been engaged. He remembered because of what he'd done to her trembling hands, when he saw the ring there.  
  
He wondered if her young man had felt anything like this, at the time.  
  
He turned away from the window, back to the room. He wouldn't be tearing at the office furniture, breaking the glass. Flooding the room with deadly light. The kind that wasn't filtered.  
  
Because he had to push the grief away, that pulled at the inner dark heart of violence at the core. Had to bind it with iron so it would settle silently to the bottom of his soul like a casket in the ocean.  
  
And that was the surface of his being. Drowned, airless caskets of memory, lying cast about and random. Covering-- settling slowly with silt. Obscuring their features, piled in haphazard rows, where it was too deep for light to touch them-- where nobody new or saw or sensed the living bodies inside, writhing with unfettered rage, beating against the prison walls..  
  
His mind was alive with the screaming voices, tearing at their bonds, choked with silence and straining through it, pulling at him. They woke him, sometimes, when he was sleeping. And half asleep, they could fill him with almost erotic pleasure at the array of them, the furious clustering masses of them. When he was still too gone into the other countries to know them for what they were. And when he woke, he pushed them down again with an intensity bordering on desperation. Best they drown.  
  
Best for everyone.  
  
And he stood alone, all this running through his mind. An image of perfect stillness and expressionless quiet in the sunlight.  
  
---  
  
Spike hit the ground, gagging in rasping breaths. He felt blood on his tongue from where he'd bitten it. His ribs were broken, and the bruises were burning on his face. It was all he could do to stay awake, as heaviness filled his mind and he tried to push up once more on the palms of his hands..  
  
It was suddenly over him again, grabbed him by the shoulders, threw him across the brush once more. The branches of the bushes raked at his back as he landed once more, knocking his wind out.  
  
And he forced himself to stand, grabbing at the trees, pulling himself up. They were dry. He needed to concentrate. He knew how this worked. He snapped off a dry branch, and fell into a familiar, defensive stance.  
  
And in an instant it was on him again. It threw a fist forward and Spike dodged it lightly, ducking beneath the arm and leaping back on the balls of his feet. The muscle memory, if not the strength, remained. It sent a shooting pain through his chest, where the ribs were hanging loosely. He felt anger welling in him as he moved to strike back.  
  
"I was trying," he gasped, striking the creature in the jaw with his best right hook. It sent a jolt of pain through his arm. The vampire smiled again, unmoved.  
  
"You should try harder," it replied, calmly. It seized his arm and twisted it casually. It snapped. Spike screamed out at the sudden, sharp pain. He stumbled and fell. He held his makeshift stake close to his chest.  
  
"I--" Spike said again, blue eyes shining.  
  
The vampire leaned over him, grabbing him by the neck. He gagged against the firm grip. But he smiled, even caught in its throttling hands. It was young and arrogant. It hadn't seen the branch.  
  
"You what?" it sneered, pulling Spike's face in front of its own. And with all that remained of his strength, drove the ragged point home.  
  
As he fell onto the ground, chalky ash sprinkling over him, he gagged to catch his breath. And he spoke softly, to the ashes.  
  
"I was trying--" he gasped out, "To think."  
  
---  
  
He buttoned the dark, patterned shirt, which fit him poorly, but provided some shelter from the elements. He's found the vampire's clothes, left in a careless pile by the shore. And it had little use for them, now.  
  
His bruises were swelling, his arm throbbing. He hoped, vaguely, that he didn't have a concussion.  
  
He pulled the collar up, trying to shield his neck form the cold, night air. As his fingers brushed across it, he paused. It had something dry and rough spattered across it.  
  
He looked down. The shirt was covered in a dried spray of blood.  
  
Somehow, looking at it-- the smell of it-- it made something snap in him. He sank onto the ground again. He felt like he might vomit, but his stomach was painfully empty.  
  
And he remembered something. Words. From before, in her gentle, distant voice. The tired one she let through, sometimes, in those rare, special moments of openness with him.  
  
"Everything here is bright, and hard, and violent... this is hell..."  
  
This is hell.  
  
And he felt a sudden compassion for her, her struggles, as he knelt in pain and horror in the dust of a ruined city.  
  
--- 


	3. Part Three

--- Isolation --- --- Part Three ---  
  
When Angel dreamed, he dreamed of wheels.  
  
Wheels and gears and turning things, like the giant wooden spokes in medieval clocks. Turning and spinning forever in cycles, rolling and clicking out their exact rythms in perfect measurements-- pulling forward, bit by bit, inexorably heading to a future which was just another revolution of the wheel.  
  
Spinning out their anger in the quiet, musty dark, shut away from the world behind walls and locked keys. Turning forever-- moving constantly in their cyclical dances, but never reaching further than that small, focused scope.  
  
It was horrifying in a way he couldn't hope to explain when he woke. Something about that certainty-- that rythmic, clinical passing of the wheels. He was bound to his fate. He had a destiny, and it pulled forward and tied him to the gears and crushed him through, only to raise him up again, the shadow of that downward spiral always waiting in the end to tear him to shreds.  
  
He started upright in bed, sweat clinging to his bare chest. He gasped for the air he did not need, and looked around the shadowed, simple darkness of his room. He lived in genteel aceticism. The walls a plain white, the floor bare save for the tibetan carpet, pools of faint track lighting flowing over it where they cast a dim glow over the cases of asian pottery.  
  
Relieved by the dream's surcease, for a moment he just was himself.  
  
But then his hand brushed against the cotton of the sheets, and he remembered the sheets in her hospital bed. Remembered the time before that-- it seemed like a hundred years ago-- when they had lain side by side, drifting to sleep with the innocent baby resting between them. A sweet, sleeping baby full of potential and silent dreaming.  
  
And he wondered, somewhere deep and quiet in his mind, what the child had dreamed of, in the time before he had known enough of the world to strike out at it.  
  
And so it all pulled on him, pulled him away from sleep, and he thought he could see the gears heading for him once more.  
  
He wasn't going to be able to sleep any longer, so he swung his legs out onto the floor. When he looked up, he jumped straight upright in alarm.  
  
The apparation had suddenly appeared in front of him, wearing her most expensive chanel perfume.  
  
"It really is disconcerting when people do that..." he said, calmly.  
  
"I don't think you'll be taking me much by surprise anymore," Lilah said smoothly, "So I figure I should return the favor while I have the chance."  
  
She walked across the carpet, her neat high heels silent against the pile. Her trim, grey suit hung over her delicately, and her floral scarf flowed from her neck like waves of grass in the wind.  
  
She stood next to the window, hand trailing close to the window pane, tracing the grain back and forth. She looked up at him, gave him a cool smile with perfectly made up, dead lips.  
  
"Great." he said, "So nice of you to stop by. We should really do this less often."  
  
She smiled her sardonic smile.  
  
"Funny."  
  
"So what do you want?"  
  
"Oh do I have to want anything to check in on my contact and associate? Just looking in to see how you were doing,. After, well... you know."  
  
She shrugged a femine, precise little shrug as she said it, smiled at him with measured affectation.  
  
"I'm touched," he responded, "So glad we had this little talk. I think I'll go back to sleep now."  
  
"Yeah that's probably a good idea. But you don't seem to be sleeping so good lately, have you?"  
  
He didn't reply.  
  
"Yeah, you'd better rest up. Gotta fight the big fight-- need to keep up that superstrength of yours. Eat all your veggies or... whatever it was that you eat."  
  
"I'll manage somehow."  
  
She walked to the open doorway, and as she went through the arch, paused, and turned back.  
  
"If it makes you feel better," she said, "I haven't seen her around my particular little corner of hell."  
  
---  
  
Spike was limping. He had been walking for hours, and the painful swelling of his sprained ankle was slowing him up. He knew the vampire had to have driven-- car or motorcycle-- something, to get to the lakeside, but he didn't want to stay to look for the vehicle, in case there were more of them waiting for him, there.  
  
It was ridiculous. They should be easy to take, but, truth be told, he wasn't sure if he could survive them, if there were more.  
  
And any way he sliced it, he didn't think he was back here just to die again twelve hours later.  
  
He leaned hard on a long branch he was using as a crutch. One eye was too swollen to see through, and the dark night took on an unreal, flat quality. Like the ink drawings in Grim's fairytales. He wondered if he'd just forgotten that the world was this dark, or if it had gone blacker since he'd burned through and died.  
  
He dragged himself down the dusty side of the abandoned road away from a town that wasn't there anymore. But somewhere, the world had to start up again. It had to. There would be a rest stop around here somewhere. He could reach something real. More than scrabbly brush and the asphalt caked with sand.  
  
But through the silence of the night, and the pain of his ribs, he was afraid he was the only one. That they'd failed and there was nothing but he and the vampire he'd killed in the whole of the world and that it had all been for nothing. And he was back to see it was for nothing, to make up for failing... because the other place had been too sweet for that, too quiet and peaceful and *finished*.  
  
He had to keep going. There had to be something out there.  
  
Somewhere.  
  
---  
  
Buffy wiped the blood from the gash on her forehead, hissing a bit as the salty sweat on her fingers stung the wound. As she took out her keys, and unlocked the door again, the florescent lights of the apartment hallway buzzed unpleasantly, moths fluttering back and forth against the surface.  
  
The television was on, blaring incoherently in the background, suggesting enthusiastically that Buffy seek the advice of qualified psycics. It was casting flickering light across the darkness of the living room. Dawn was on one arm, sprawled on the sofa, dozed off. The morning light had almost spread across the sky, which was painted a fine and deep blue.  
  
"Dawn..." Buffy whispered, dropping her light weapon's bag and laying a hand gently on her sister's shoulder, "Dawnie, it's time you got to bed..."  
  
Her sister blinked against the glare of the television, eyes opening blearily. And then she started, fully awake. She looked at her sister, reaching out to her face.  
  
"You're bleeding," she said, her voice soft and muffled with sleep.  
  
Buffy smiled softly.  
  
"Yeah," she said, "Don't worry about it, it's nothing serious."  
  
And she walked into the adjoining kitchenette, and ran cool water over her face. It felt good, wiping away the travel and the battle sweat. And she sensed Dawn's shadow in the doorway.  
  
"It is too something serious," Dawn said, her voice exacting and bitter.  
  
"Dawn, sweetie, I'm fine, there's nothing to be upset about-- now go to sleep."  
  
"No," Dawn replied, "You don't get it. I thought we were going to have our lives again, like it was before--"  
  
"Before Sunnydale?" Buffy asked softly, "Dawnie-- it can't ever be like that, you know that."  
  
"But you were so *happy* and I thought--"  
  
"Dawn," Buffy said softly, sinking into a kitchen chair, "I need to tell you something."  
  
She played with the corner of a lace-edged placemate, and Dawn suddenly realized, looking at her sister's hands, that the dust and grime under her fingernails had been alive earlier in the evening.  
  
"I saved a girl's life tonight," she said plainly.  
  
Dawn stood silently, watching her, and her face softened a bit.  
  
"Her name was Christy," Buffy continued, "And if I hadn't gone when I did, she would be dead. If I sat and watched cartoons with you, her sister wouldn't ever have gotten to do that with her ever again. Not ever."  
  
"Dawn, you're right. It is serious-- It's serious, but not because I'm bleeding. It's because no matter how many of us there are, we've all got the power. The power to save them. Christy would be lying in that alley now, cold and alone and dead and gone. I needed to save her, because even if there are others out there for me, there was no one else out there for her. This is the work I have to do"  
  
"You can't do it all..." Dawn whispered, remember her words on the tower that seemed so long ago.  
  
"I know," she said softly, her hazel eyes wisened and gentle, "But I can do all I can."  
  
"And don't worry sweetheart, we're not losing anyone we don't have to," Buffy said, half to herself, reaching out to stroke her sister's hair. She had that distant look in her eyes, the one that Dawn couldn't read. Except tonight, that very disassociation made her understand what her sister was thinking. Because she always got that closed-off look when they were talking about him.  
  
"It's because he's dead..." Dawn said, softly, "It's because of what happened..."  
  
Her sister was silent a moment. They hadn't spoken about it at all since that day, months ago. The refridgerator hummed behind them.  
  
"No Dawn," Buffy replied, quietly, "Not like how you mean it..."  
  
But there was something almost whistful in her voice, something Dawn didn't really understand as her sister spoke, half smiling, her hand in Dawn's long hair, holding onto the locks gently, but firmly, like some kind of tender lifeline.  
  
"But really... if a vampire can give his life to save the world, Dawn, can't we give up a Saturday night to save one girl?"  
  
And Dawn began to realize her sister no longer saw duty as a burden, but as a chosen banner hanging over them all. And there was love in it, as well as pain and death.  
  
"Yeah," Dawn said, her eyes suddenly wet from remembering her sister on that tower. She was always on that tower, somewhere in Dawn's mind. She could lose her at any moment.  
  
"Yeah, we can..." Dawn said, "But the things is-- the thing is that it could become forever so easy..."  
  
And that's when Buffy hugged her.  
  
---  
  
Angel was driving fast through the California desert, the tinted glass of the sportscar shielding him in cool, shadowed darkness from the morning light.  
  
They'd wanted to send a driver. He'd wanted to check this out himself.  
  
He'd been awakened once again by a nervous but steady rapping on his apartment door. His annoyance had risen to levels that would probably involve beheadings if there was an axe handy.  
  
But the rapping wouldn't cease. And it was one of the swarm of personal assistants, looking at him nervously. She was hopping back and forth in her carefully polished, Prada heels, clearly uncomfortably around him. He could hardly blame her.  
  
"Yes?" Angel had asked, the doork opened partially. She took a step back, phone in her hand.  
  
"Mr. Angel..." she'd began, "Mr. Angel, I'm sorry to interrupt you, I know it's late... early..."  
  
"Yes?" Angel asked again, a bit colder this time.  
  
"I'm sorry to wake you, but he wouldn't stop asking for you-- do you-- do you know someone named Spike?"  
  
And so he was driving out to the middle of nowhere to collect a dead vampire whom he had spoken to some hours ago on his own private line, the one they'd kept the number from the hotel open to, so they could keep in touch with their old contacts...  
  
He'd asked him straight out why he hadn't called Buffy instead. He only half believed the voice on the other side.  
  
"I..." Spike had said, the voice pausing a moment, rasping like he was in pain. It was a confused tone, strained. Like he was half on the edge of something drastic.  
  
"I don't know where she is," he burst out, then, "There's only you."  
  
He sounded on the verge of tears. It was profoundly uncomfortable.  
  
"Wait there," Angel had responded, taking the intruiging if somewhat disquieting bair, "I'll come."  
  
He hadn't decided to go yet, though. Not really. He hadn't decided to go entirely until minutes after he'd hung up-- after he'd walked halfway down the steriles hall.  
  
It could be anything, really. Could mean anything, really. And his instinct was humming in the back of his skull. Something was wrong with this. Beyond the resurrection from death-- that was old hat. In their little circle, who hadn't done that a couple of times? His bones were warning him that this was something new. Something serious.  
  
No, he could leave Spike or what claimed to be Spike there at the gas station that, for looking totally anandoned, had happened to have a phone. He hadn't decided.  
  
It was when Lilah turned the corner of that hallway and headed towards him, the determined look on her face, that he made the decision.  
  
"Don't go to get him."  
  
Angel decided to go get him.  
  
Oh they'd bantered, back and forth. He asked her how many times she intended to visit this morning. She might give him the wrong idea about the professionalism of their relationship. She'd laughed at it, but her eyes were steel.  
  
"As a matter of professional courtesy," she had said, piercing him through with the gaze, "I am asking you not to get him."  
  
"And are you telling me not to get him so that I won't go or so I will go just to spite you?"  
  
She smiled.  
  
"Haven't you already made up your mind about that?" she stated calmly, "I'm just making it clear you might not want to see what's behind door number three..."  
  
"What do you know about this?"  
  
"Not much more than you," she said, "We're still working on it. We'll have more later on. We already have Wesley working with his team, trying to dig something up... metaphorically, of course."  
  
"Of course," he said distantly, turning in the direction of the carport.  
  
And as she walked away, ordering a passing assistant to bring one of Mr. Angel's cars around, she tossed her head back to him, smiling, her tone dancing with the fiesty, sharp, sarcastic humor he sometimes respected in her.  
  
"Let's just say that, from what I know about this now-- that somebody up there *likes* you..."  
  
---  
  
When he pulled up to the lonely, dusty old station, with each corner and crevice filled with sand, the white paint peeling away from the old aluminum siding, which rattled in the wind, he saw a figure sitting in the shade under an old, dry gas pump. Its legs were folded, it was staring forward with an almost meditative silence, out past the station into the barren horizon. He noticed the sunlight dancing in a soft pattern across the bruised brow, and something began to rattle around in the back of Angel's mind that troubled him.  
  
The figure looked up as the car quietly pulled up alongside.  
  
It was him. Definately him.  
  
Badly beaten, but in much of their time together, that had been the case.  
  
It was Spike. Head to toe. The head, though, was crowned in the soft brown curls Angel remembered from the early days of their aquaintance. The feet were bare, crusted with sand. One of his ankles was a bloody purple, swollen and clearly injured. He held his right arm tight against his side, clutching it below the shoulder with his left hand. Half his face was a mass of bruises. His shirt was covered in dried blood, which Angel could smell, with some disquiet, was not Spike's own.  
  
He rose and limped to the car, dragging the bad ankle beside him, leaving a trailing line in the sand. When he slid in, he collapsed into the seat, seemingly exhausted. He leaned his head back, closing his eyes a moment with a strange combination of relief and dread at the company he now kept.  
  
"Who could you possibly have pissed off that much in the last half a day?" Angel asked, and then paused, considering this.  
  
"Well, it is *you*, of course..."  
  
"Charmed as always. Turns out, though," Spike said, his voice hoarse, but obviously his own, "That vampires aren't as friendly as we might remember them."  
  
But banter spread thin over the tension, and confusion, and the filtered light streamed through that special, slightly tinted glass all around them. Spike tapped the glass lightly.  
  
"Nice setup."  
  
"Thanks."  
  
"Helping the hopeless must pay better in the big city... Here, mostly gets you blown up..."  
  
Silence. Silence stretching over the long minutes and into nearly an hour. They had pulled out onto the interstate now, and the cars swarmed around them like shiny, colorful locusts. Spike was staring out the window, forehead pressed lightly against the glass. The world flew by him at a swift and brilliant clip.  
  
They passed a car, on the highway lane beside them, the backseat tumbled full of young children. They waved at him through the windows. Or so he thought. They might be waving at something else.  
  
He was pondering whether or not they had been waving at him when Angel spoke again, breaking the quiet with a tired question that sounded like he only half cared what the answer was.  
  
"So," Angel sighed out, sick of listening to what could only be the steady heartbeat and breathing of his companion, "What happened?"  
  
And looking out at the world beyond the car, something occured to Spike. These were cars full of lives-- of people all around him. Like hundreds of little candle lights making a blazing fire.  
  
These people would be dead if he hadn't died. None of this would be here.  
  
He smiled. He'd done something. He had really managed to do something. Something big, with that sense of vastness he'd dreamed about with his pen in his hand, so long ago. It felt right. It had all come out just right.  
  
And some of the heavenly glow seemed to remain in him that he'd thought, in the night darkness, that he'd lost forever. It wasn't far away. It moved on the polished wood and leather of the dashboard. It was in the warm sun outside. It fell on him and soaked through his skin. Softly-- so softly and gently across his bruised flesh, with sweet and painful tenderness.  
  
And he realized he was ignoring Angel's question, and Angel was glancing over to him, watching him smiling broadly like an idiot through the bloody mess of his face, staring at something out the window.  
  
He turned to his companion and straightened his expression. He cleared his throat.  
  
"Don't exactly know," Spike said.  
  
And he paused a moment before he spoke again, his tone quieter, his voice soft like when Angel remembered he'd speak when he was trying to calm one of Drusilla's fits.  
  
"But I can tell you..." he said in that soft and gentle tone, that sounded a thousand miles away, "It was amazing..."  
  
--- 


	4. Part Four

--- Isolation ---  
  
--- Part Four ---  
  
It was the usual thing. No point in even listening, really. Most fulfilled prophecies are pretty much the same, when you think about it.  
  
Chosen One, blah blah. Big battle, blah blah. Much striving, blah blah. Dying-and-Living, and souls and the gift of a human lifespan...  
  
Blah. Blah.  
  
It was when the words 'Favored of the Powers' popped up that he started contracting a severe headache.  
  
So he'd done what's generally expected in such circumstances, and gathered his close friends and evil, clipboard weilding associates in a conference room with him, to discuss recent and intruiging events. Many of which, of course, involved declaring amazing revelations of broad scope that pretty much tore apart everything that made his existence even remotely tangible, noteworthy, or otherwise bearable.  
  
He might have burst out laughing, in loud, crazed seizures, if he weren't as good at holding back what he really felt and thought.  
  
He sat in his ash brown, $1,250 Aaron chair, and folded his hands neatly on the walnut table. He thought Spike would have made some sort of comment about that, if he hadn't left him at the Hyperion. This was best done out of his presence. He wouldn't have to look at him that way. And he wanted to keep him out of Wolfram and Hart's direct gaze, at least until they knew exactly what was going on. And what the firm had to gain or lose by it.  
  
It was Fred, in her pretty little smock dress and braided hair, leaning forward attentively with bright eyes, who turned to him first with some kind of understanding.  
  
"If this is all true... then-- then the prophcies are fulfilled now. The battle they spoke of-- is it really over...?" she said, turning to look him in the eyes, "Oh Angel, are you allright?"  
  
He looked at her a moment blankly, that slight pause in his smooth, even voice. As if vaguely surprised by the question  
  
"Fine," he said, "I'm fine."  
  
"Maybe," she said, "Maybe, Angel... we should call Buffy?"  
  
He stood up, heading toward the office door.  
  
"No. We should wait until we know what we're dealing with before we pull her out of the hellmouth again," he responded. As he walked out the door, he continued in a calmly casual tone.  
  
"I think we've covered everything we have at the moment. I'm going out for a while."  
  
Fred would notice, later, that he'd taken his favorite axe along with him.  
  
---  
  
Fred would also notice, as she walked down the street in the sunlight, enjoying the sound of the passing cars, that she suddenly took great satisfaction in Doing for Herself, as her mother used to call it.  
  
`A woman's got to learn to Do for Herself in this world, Winifred,' she'd say, that certain variety of domestic wisdom in her voice, `You'll be wise never to forget that.'  
  
She'd started out cared for by loving parents. Being cared for by less than loving lawyers was starting to unsettle her in ways she was trying to avoid thinking of.  
  
Need information on a demonic language or the history of an ancient cabal? Pick up the phone. Fancy a trip to Athens? The phone. Nice iced Chai with just enough cinnamon and not so much sugar that the ginger won't leave your tongue with that pleasant little tingle? The device you needed was sitting there, in its sleek black cradle, the line connecting to her assistants at the slightest touch.  
  
She'd almost expected a little card on her desk,when she first stepped into her knew quarters. 'Welcome to Your Home From Home, it'd read, like Number Six in The Prisoner had recieved on his arrival. The welcoming, threatening greeting-- the perfect illusion of freedom which she was starting to wonder if didn't just hide some iron claws under the surface.  
  
Doing for Herself, as her mother had called it, made her happy now. Yes. So today, she didn't pick up the phone to order up the particular volume of trans-dimensional theoretical physics she was interested in thumbing through. You know. For fun.  
  
Instead she fired up her sleek little laptop and scared up the location of a copy at the library, to which she was headed. Or, she would be headed to, after her detour.  
  
After all, she wasn't *expressly* told not to. Angel's look when he said he'd taken this Spike to the Hyperion sort of implied he was to be left alone there. But even if he'd downright ordered it, she doubted she would have viewed his conviction with authority.  
  
She was curious. She wanted to meet this man who had been twice dead.  
  
So she detoured down the famililar street, where she'd lived and knew the cracks in the sidewalks and the names of the shops and the particular swaying of the tree limbs. Because she was curious. And because it was oddly liberating to feel that she was going where no assistants fetched or carried, or watched her with their observant, waiting eyes.  
  
---  
  
Angel dropped into the sewer walkways, the famliar smells of dampness, rats, and waste washing over him like an acrid flow of water. And he began his swift and silent stalking, in the darkness that wasn't darkness to him. No, because, he was a vampire.  
  
He could see in the dark places.  
  
---  
  
He was standing in her old room.  
  
She'd had little trouble finding him. It was the only room in the empty first wing with the door open. It looked strangely hollow with all her clothes and books and the other little pieces of her life moved away. The brilliant, late summer sun glowed through the window, covering the walls and wood floors with natural light. Dust motes floated in the sunbeams, and a sense of stillness filled the air. It felt like her grandmother's attic on a Saturday afternoon when she could rifle through the old photo albums that smelled like cedar from being stored in the chest up there that was also full of quilts. It had that quiet, settled quality. And in that moment, she decided she missed her old room.  
  
And now a handsome man stood in the middle of it-- or a man who might have been handsome under the heavy swell of bruising. His right arm was in a sling, and his sandy brown hair was falling in loose, wild ringlets over his face. He was standing there, leaning on a crutch, and looked like he hadn't really moved from the spot for hours. He was wearing some of Charles' clothes that he had left behind, and held a cloth dust-cover in his hands.  
  
Silently, staring straight at the wall and into the full length mirror he'd removed the cover from.  
  
She walked up behind him, and he must have known she was there, because he didn't start at her approach.  
  
"I bet that's weird for you, isn't it?" she said kindly, a broad and somewhat nervous smile on her face, "I mean, so long without one of those reflections and now, here it is! I can't even think of it. It all must be strange for you. A lot of strange things happen around here. Well, not that I'm at all used to things like exactly like this... even though I did get pulled into another dimension once and it was strange too-- and I'm Fred, by the way-- I'm a friend of Angel's--"  
  
And she would have continued the loosely constructed tirade, but the man had suddenly burst out laughing.  
  
Quietly at first, his mouth curving into a sly smile and the laughter suddenly bursting out of him like it had been welling there for days. Wild gales of kind laughter that echoed slightly against the walls of the mostly empty room.  
  
And as he tried to regain his composure, and failed, Fred took a step back. Their figures were echoed in the mirror before them. Hers looked slightly confused, and a little hurt. She wasn't trying to be funny, after all...  
  
He seemed to read this from her, looked up at her reflection, standing there in the mirror beside his image, and spoke to her in a cadence she sensed was uniquely his own. Something he took pride in, had constructed from scratch. An accent to fit what he'd wanted to be, and now had become like some tattoo you got in a drunken spring break. Just natural, there for life.  
  
"Don't trouble yourself, sweetness," he said, smiling broadly once more, "It's not you, it's just I used to dye my hair... seems kind of ridiculous now, can you believe it...?"  
  
He turned to the mirror again, walked closer to it, and touched his brow with his fingers. Sunbeams streamed through the blinds, dust motes sparkling through them as his voice echoed against the bare walls and floorboards.  
  
"And it's just this, here," he said, his tone building as if to the punchline of a joke, "I mean, the scar's still there. Why would my hair go all natural-like and the scar still remain? Doesn't make any sense..."  
  
And he looked at her again with that bright, disarming smile. As if he found countless things in the world-- details and situations and concepts and even serious things like duties and birthrights-- like he found all those things utterly and completely funny in ways that had never occured to him that they could be funny before.  
  
"Ah well," he continued, shrugging it off and turning from the mirror to face her, "Can't trouble with all the bleeding things that don't make sense or our brains would turn 'round backwards."  
  
She'd been through enough to know that was true. And just like that, she decided she liked him. He had a natural warmth about him, something hinting that he knew something that no one else did. That he'd seen something so bright and amazing and complete that he couldn't help but laugh at himself out loud.  
  
"I was going to stop by the library, it's not too far from here," she said, "If you think you can handle a little walking, maybe you'd want to get out, come with me?"  
  
And he looked at her,a slight, kind smile on his face,his blue eyes shining in the softly filtered sunlight.  
  
---  
  
A spatter of blood sprayed across Angel's face in the subterannean darkness. The neck separated from the shoulders in a swift swoop, flying backwards and striking against the wet bricks.  
  
The last of them collapsed to ash in the remnants of their nest. They lived in careless filth that reeked even in the sewerways, the skin magazines congealing on the wet floor and sticking together, forever sealed to the concrete. A single exposed bulb swung overhead, and he lowered his axe. It had become eerily quiet in this tiny, underground recess of the world. And for a moment, like when he awoke from deep slumber, he was just himself, coasting on the adrenaline and the exultant cry of violence in his heart.  
  
And then, the moment faded, and he just felt sadness.  
  
A wave of it that hit him full force so that it would have knocked him over if he hadn't leaned against the wall. The aching, hollow kind of loneliness that strikes sometimes when you hear the voice of a dead loved one in another room, and it's really just the weatherman on the radio and you were mistaken. You were mistaken. Or just a mistake.  
  
A cosmic blunder. Pulled along on the wheel, because there was always an order to things. And this was his order. Kill.  
  
And he bowed his head, looking at his dark shoes resting on top of the slimy coating of damp paper. Some airbrushed girl smiled up at him, on the back of a horse. Puffy white, children's mural clouds crowded the landscape behind her, stained a bizarre shade of rusty grey by the moisture on the floor and the remnants of the vampire's meals that tainted them.  
  
"That's the great thing about vampires," Lilah said, stepping into the makeshift, soiled room.  
  
Immediately he sank into the mask of calm he so commonly wore. It fell over his features like a blackout curtain.  
  
He stood up straight and looked her in the eye.  
  
"They don't leave anything behind. Just ash. Blows away mostly. No cleanup necessary. Makes it all easier. I mean, who's to know if you rip a few a part just because it's, well... what's the word?"  
  
She paused for dramatic effect.  
  
"Oh yeah, that's it-- Fun."  
  
He turned from her, brow slightly furrowed.  
  
"By the way," she said, eyes smiling their chilled smiles, "You got something on there..."  
  
She gestured to his cheek, where the spatter of blood had become a spatter of ash, crumbling and already falling away from him. He reached up absently and brushed it away. He looked at his fingertips, grey and ghostly with the fine powder.  
  
"I do so enjoy our talks," he said quietly. And she smiled at him.  
  
"I like to think we have a special connection," she said.  
  
---  
  
Fred held the book in her hand, its clean, green binding shining in the light streaming through the tall, leaded glass windows. She slipped it into her bag, and pushed on the brasswork door handles, and the heavy oak swung out onto the busy downtown street, so incongruous with the quiet, three story stone building behind her. The afternoon heat washed over her like an embrace as she flitted delicately down the stairs, craning her neck all the while to see where Spike had gone to.  
  
There were a series of fountains lining the road, here. He had wanted to watch them, watch the people sitting around them on the patches of green grass. Somewhere, across the street, a college student sat with a guitar, singing:  
  
`I hear the soft breathing of the girl that I love, as she lies here beside me asleep with the night. And her hair in a fine mist floats on my pillow, reflecting the glow of the gentle moonlight...'  
  
After talking to him all afternoon, hearing the things that had happened, she thought she might just call Buffy, no matter what Angel thought of it... she didn't know her well, though she'd stopped at the Hyperion for a while after their most recent apocalypse-- but she thought she'd want to be informed. And the voice floated over the noise of the crowds and the cars, distantly echoing as she walked down the stairwell.  
  
`She is soft, she is warm but my heart remains heavy, as I watch as her breasts gently rise, gently fall. For I know at the first light of dawn I'll be leaving, and tonight will be all I have left to recall...'  
  
She scanned with her eyes where there were larger fountains, dividing the four lane roads swelling with cars, resting on the median strips and throwing crystalline water into the air.  
  
And she shrieked out loud as she saw the cars swerving out of the way of the lone figure, strolling up through the lanes as if it was a woodland trail. He had a pronounced limp as he moved slowly forward into traffic, as if he wanted to compound his injuries, and he was staring at something in the side of a modernist skyscraper, at the end of the stretch, where it divided into two. The building reflected the sun and the blue sky, the windows warped into a swooping curve up to the soaring hight of the tower.  
  
She dropped her bag, and ran down the stairs, the sound of blaring horns surrounding her as she bolted across the grass, pushing through crowds of pedestrians to the street.  
  
"Spike!" she cried out. The cars were swerving out of his path, and he ignored them. He had his head tilted to the side, his eyes intensley focused.  
  
She paused a moment at the curb, and with a nervous wimper, darted into the oncoming traffic after him.  
  
Dodging a bald man in a black convertable, she ran forward, her tooled leather sandles rapping against the dotted lane line. The bald man called some choice words over his shoulder, but she was too focused on reaching her companion to hear them.  
  
"Spike!" she called out, rushing forward and grabbing his arm, "What on earth are you doing?!?!"  
  
He turned to her as if they had met by chance in a supermarket line, and not in the middle of a busy road.  
  
"What'd you think I was going to do?" he asked, calmly, as if he couldn't think of a reason she'd be upset, or if she was, that it must be a joke, "Die?"  
  
"Well maybe," she said, shaken and somewhat annoyed, "That sometimes happens when we take strolls on main traffic areteries..."  
  
"But look at it."  
  
He gestured up at the fountain on the corner of the tall coorperate tower, to which he'd been approaching. The beads of water shot up high overhead and reflected in the convex curving of the mirrored glass.  
  
And they were reflected there, too. The pair of them, on the road, it seemed like hundreds of times, at slightly different angles, all along the glass.  
  
He stepped onto the curb, and she let out a breath she didn't realize she'd been holding. Now they were relatively safe from being flattened by enraged motorists.  
  
Yet he was still staring at their images, cast in the beads of water, which threw themselves up just inches away from them and the carved granite base on which they were standing.  
  
He was smiling into the water, once more. They could smell it, cold and fresh against the hot summer light. Always moving across the stone and falling through the air in heavy beads and delicate mist.  
  
And to her surprise, he gently reached out and took her hand. It was a calm, almost matter-of-fact gesture. He looked at it a moment, as if it was somehow fascinating in a way Fred couldn't understand.  
  
And then he tugged firmly on her arm, throwing his weight back, and pulled her with him into the fountain, and suddenly they were drenched with a shock of cold water.  
  
And she wasn't sure if he was laughing, again, but she realize that she was. The sound surprised her even as she did it. The world was white frothy water and the whirling speed of headlights and the glass and the sunshine, and it was all perfect and cold with wet and hot with sun at the same time.  
  
Even with everthing that had happened-- even through all the warped pain they had suffered, somehow, the part of herself that was really herself just rose up out of it and looked through the blazing afternoon with something like pure joy.  
  
---  
  
Angel turned a corner into another sewer tunnel that looked exactly like the last. But he knew where he was. And he knew he couldn't go back yet. He just had to keep going, until he could break this cycle of grief like he could break the bodies of the soulless monsters who lived in the shadow worlds below, away from men.  
  
Dust clung to his clothes, and the stink of the sewers covered him. And as he kicked through a boarded up doorway and into another crowded nest, he thought, in some distant part of his conciousness, that he might never be able to get the stain clean.  
  
-- 


	5. Part Five

--- Isolation ---  
  
--- Part Five ---  
  
Buffy pushed open the Hyperion doors, walking cautiously into the empty space within.  
  
The door shut behind her, the slam of it mingling with the clicking of her heels on the floor. Immediately the busy, morning sounds of traffic muffled to nothing, and the silence of the empty place flowed over her.  
  
It was disconcerting, enough to keep her awake since she'd gotten the call. Fred had been insistent, on the phone, but wouldn't tell her why. It was almost as if she didn't trust Buffy to believe her, or understand her properly. And she spoke quietly, somewhat vaguely, as if she was afraid of others overhearing her who might be nearby.  
  
"Just come," she said, "Please, it's important…"  
  
"I was just there a few days ago— and yeah, I know Angel's upset… but I'm not exactly made of plane tickets…"  
  
"I took care of that."  
  
"You took care—"  
  
"There's a car waiting at the curb for you now, it'll take you to the plane."  
  
And Buffy had pushed the drapes away from her bedroom window. There was indeed a sober, black vehicle waiting with the engine on, hovering by the curbside below.  
  
So she came. And she knew, now, that Angel was into something, something she wasn't sure she would like. And she half expected, walking in the door, to see Cordelia there, clinging with grave dirt, shaking and confused as she herself had been. Because that sense of dread was on her, for she knew about power, and about grief, and what grief could make people do with that power.  
  
So she'd come, unsure whether she was there to comfort the berieved or to fight them to the death. It was often that way, with Angel, whose ruthlessness with his convictions was sometimes as dangerous as a ragged blade.  
  
"Angel…?" she called out, uncertainly, into the echoing vast emptiness of the hall. She passed the now empty weapon's cabinet, and the glass walls of the office. There were still papers on the desk, notes pinned to the message boards, written in Cordelia's own hand.  
  
She was passing by the garden doors when she saw a movement, through them. She approached, and the sillohoutte materialized into the doorframe from the light and shadow outside.  
  
---  
  
When he saw her, standing in a light, lacy dress with her hair loose about her shoulders, he smiled a soft and fascinated smile—as if he'd never seen her before that moment.  
  
She stood and looked at him, framed in the light of the door.  
  
Thinking was like treading through heavy water as she stood there, frozen in place.  
  
"You're wearing plaid," she blurted out.  
  
Surprised, he let out a quiet, airy chuckle. She stepped forward, towards him, closing the space and letting the sunlight fall across her. The soft white embroidery of her dress fell in ruched folds down her shoulders, glowing in that sunlight that was almost as bright as the glow in the cave.  
  
She reached out to his sides and gathered up his hands, lightly. They were warm and solid.  
  
She skated her fingers across the surface of the palms, as if she were reading them. But she was looking at his face.  
  
"You're… wearing plaid," she repeated, falteringly, her eyes shining with tears.  
  
A bird called in the garden, clinging in the vines and hopping back and forth against the stones.  
  
"Hello Buffy," he said, overcome the full depth of the tenderness that had grown between them.  
  
---  
  
"Hey Fang Boy," the voice cheerfully erupted, startling Angel out of a full sleep. He'd thought it was Cordelia's voice, a moment, and he half expect her face above him. But it was part of the dream, its sounds, breaking through on reality.  
  
"Lilah," he greeted her.  
  
"You really need to work on staff dicipline. I thought—well, you know, good guys, fighting the fight together, facing peril. All that. Seems like they might actually listen to you once and awhile."  
  
He sat up, letting his sheets fall about him a soft pool. He ran a hand across his eyes.  
  
"What was it you're going on about?"  
  
"Hey I'm doing you a favor—you should know there's been some interesting activity by day in our wacky little family."  
  
"Did someone try to pry your head off again?"  
  
"Hardly. Just think you should be prepared—Fred's been a naughty little independent thinker. I knew there was a reason everyone seems to like her so much."  
  
"I must be forgetting," Angel replied, "Did I tell her not to do something?"  
  
"Well, you certainly wanted to—implied it-- and Fred knew that…" she said, "Lovely set of complexes you have there. All the guilt, and repression, and then more guilt— throw some jealousy on the top of that-- Beautiful."  
  
And she continued, smiling cooly and leaning close.  
  
"I think, really, that's what makes you the man you are today."  
  
---  
  
Spike sat next to Buffy on a high wall. They were both staring out into the ocean.  
  
"But doesn't it hurt?" Buffy asked quietly, after some time. Her tone was soft, as she remembered the harshness of the world around her when she came back.  
  
He looked at her, her hair pushed off her face by the breeze.  
  
"No," he said then, reaching out to finger a strand of her hair gently, where it was strewn down over her shoulder, "It doesn' t hurt at all…"  
  
---  
  
The Hyperion was silent, truly empty. But even through it, the smell of her, that smell of light and power and perfume hovered in the air. And his. But they were gone.  
  
She had been here. She knew. Lilah had warned him, but why had she waited long enough that they'd gone away, together?  
  
---  
  
Buffy stood at the door of the Hyperion, and paused as Spike passed in front of her and through into the lobby. She just watched him. After all their words this day—words that poured out like water—truths that fell over them but didn't hurt at all. It was so different. He was so different—but himself.  
  
What she thought of most when she thought of him—it was there. He was still himself.  
  
"I'll come back," she said, and he turned and watched her, her hand on the door handle.  
  
"Come soon," he said.  
  
And she turned to go, but he called after her.  
  
"Buffy—" he said, and she turned to him.  
  
"When are we going to save the world again?"  
  
She just smiled when he said it, and it was a warm, genuine smile. Not the one she stretched over her face to please her friends. It felt like he'd been given some glowing gift. And a bit of that shining goodness—that pure, tender effulgence that he'd felt in the Other World—that he'd seen in the laughing children on the highway— in Fred's laughter-- it seemed to be in Buffy, too. It wasn't gone—he wasn't bereft of it, it was overflowing in everything alive.  
  
"I'll let you know," she said, turning away into the night.  
  
---  
  
Angel snapped awake with a sense of profound disorientation. He must have drifted asleep in his watch. Which was extremely bad form for a hunter and warrior. Darkness had settled over the tiles of the floor, and he knew it was hours since he'd arrived.  
  
And a sound downstairs. Spike was here. He couldn't hear any sound of the other.  
  
He pitched himself over the railing of the gallery and alighted, lightfooted and silent, on the lobby floor, as if he were some great, black bird swooping down. And he could still hear him, sense Spike's presence. There were regular, rasping sounds coming from the garden—the sound of a pencil hitting paper.  
  
---  
  
Angel's dark sillohoutte entered the garden quietly. Spike was sitting of the floor, a pad of paper on his knee. The night jasmine was blooming, and a quiet, dry breeze floated by.  
  
Spike looked up at the solemn face, watching him. For the hundreth time since he got back, he tried to remember why it was people were so serious all the time.  
  
"Angel," he said, quietly, "You don't look quite proper, you been sleeping enough?"  
  
Everyone kept looking at him with the same worried, careworn faces. They almost looked ill with it, pale and drawn compared to the health and light of the other world he had so recently left behind him.  
  
"I'll get by."  
  
Angel gestured to Spike's sling. It was clipped and forced, as if he were holding something in that was so powerful it shook his foundations.  
  
"How's the arm?"  
  
Spike read the stiffness in his movements, and looked him over carefully.  
  
"I'll get by…"  
  
He lowered his pencil, his full attention on his companion.  
  
"What's that?" Angel asked, his tone guarded as he approached, slowly, pacing through the garden, along the walls.  
  
"Probably the only good thing you ever taught me how to do…"  
  
Spike handed him the drawing. He wasn't as skilled as Angel, with it. Less rigidly controlled technique, less realism in the figures. They always seemed to come from somewhere else. And yet Angelus had been at his most patient when explaining forshortening and light sources. He had almost, occasionally, been pleased with Spike's progress, in spite of himself.  
  
Because—well—because it was Art. And a ballet had once made Angelus weep. And he wept for nothing.  
  
Angel turned the drawing to face him. It was Buffy. Unmistakable, smiling, face framed by her loose, scattered hair.  
  
And something that had been building strained at the tension in his soul. The curtain over his features began to quiver. His mind whirled in a mad rush to maintain control.  
  
His restraint snapped, and he struck out.  
  
Without warning, his fist connected to Spike's jaw and sent him sprawling. The bruises that had been fading across it began to well up with blood.  
  
And Spike did something that took Angel away from himself, and he felt the old, smoldering rage branch out from where it had been twisting in his gut and spread through his body.  
  
He laughed.  
  
A string of bloody saliva trailed down to the flagstones from where he braced them, shaking with the wracks of his laughter.  
  
It was like entering a cold pool of water that enveloped everything and suffocated all other sensation. Angel grabbed him by the shoulders, throwing him through the door, onto the lobby tiles, knocking the wind from him.  
  
Yet still his body shook with it, with the laughter that defied him—it was almost as if Angel wasn't' there at all. Invisible in the enraged expression of his pain.  
  
"What is it, boy?" Angel spat out, his tone cold and familiar as Spike registered it through the ringing pain in his ears.  
  
Spike tried to regain his composure to respond, his breath coming in spasms. He tried to pull himself up on his feet, but slipped and landed again. And it set him laughing.  
  
Angel kicked him in the ribs, and seized him, throwing him again against the wall. He wasn't even fighting back—however he could now, in this weak, human body.  
  
"I asked you a question, boy," he said, the chill in his voice reflected in his eyes, "What is it?"  
  
"I—" Spike spat out, blood running down his cheek from a reopened wound. And yet still he couldn't stop.  
  
"I don't know…" he gasped, "Everything—it just all seems to funny to me now!"  
  
"Well is this Funny?"  
  
Angel pulled him up against the wall, grappling his throat tightly. He gasped innefectually for air.  
  
"Is this funny?"  
  
He pressed harder, and still Spike's eyes were calm. No matter how he'd been hurt, he wasn't afraid at all. And so he did the only think he could do, wringing his neck savagely, throwing him up aganst the wall so his skull hit hard against the surface, denting the drywall.  
  
"Is this FUNNY to you? WELL?"  
  
And the mirth still shined in the blue eyes, the eyes of a man who stared straight into the darkness of death and laughed.  
  
He was mouthing something, trying to speak, but couldn't gather the air. Angel threw him down and Spike was suddenly shaking with ragged coughs. As he tried to speak again, and it came out a dry gurgle.  
  
"What was that?"  
  
"P—Poor Angel," he said, his voice a hoarse croak.  
  
"You think—you think this is the way. B--but you'll always lose, because you never left this… it only lasts—last a minute. And then—then you're al—alone again…"  
  
As the bleeding creature before him laughed in rasping gasts, images ran through his mind. Darla—his father. Cordelia. Cordelia.  
  
He meant to strike out again, to bash the creatures skull out against the floor. But his hand hung limp by his side. And he rushed back to himself as if he'd been physically absent and the crushing weight of it cleaved to him on all sides like the sharp points of an iron maiden.  
  
And Angel was on the ground, though he didn't remember collapsing. And he was sobbing. Sobbing heavy, gasping sobs that shook his shoulders with the violence of them. The walls—his walls were broken and he was running out everywhere, losing himself in the chaos and randomness of his own agonized existence. He sat among the pieces and just cried out in pain.  
  
"She's dead. She's dead and you get to live—" he spat out brokently, and his tone changed and he wasn't speaking about Cordelia anymore.  
  
"You get to live…"  
  
And he felt a hand, suddenly, resting securely on his shoulder. He could smell the bloodied bruises on it.  
  
---  
  
Spike was looking at him with softened eyes. His body was bent and broken, weak and bleeding, but he squeezed Angel's shoulder with confidence and strength. The moment was silent, but something changed between them forever in the instant.  
  
"Oh lovely," the voice rang out over Angel, "We're about to get to some interesting violence and, of course, we have to stop to talk about our feelings…"  
  
Angel looked up. She stood there in her neatly tailored suit.  
  
"Lilah," he said, startled, straining to cover up the explosion of feeling—his red, stained eyes, and found it utterly impossible.  
  
And she grinned then. A wide, cruel grin that was too sharp and long for her face.  
  
"Oh, no," it said coldly, "I'm not Lilah."  
  
Angel started, throwing himself back, and out of Spike's grip. Spike looked confused, staring into the air, seeing nothing at all where Angel stared in dull horror.  
  
"No, Lilah hasn't visited you in quite a while," it continued, "They don't let the dead out quite that easy you know… well, unless they're very special."  
  
She smirked, crouched down and looked Spike in the bloody face.  
  
"Shame, too. These are some amazing bruises."  
  
"Angel," Spike asked, his tone puzzled, "What're you seeing?"  
  
"Spike-- he can't see you…" Angel said.  
  
It melted seamlessly out of her shape and into another. One with dark, doe eyes and a confident, brazen tongue.  
  
"That's the thing," it said bitterly, in Cordelia's voice, "I'm sick of father's favorites, he likes to do that with the ones he snatches—"  
  
It reached out to grab Spike with one hand, and merely passed right through.  
  
"--Out of my fingers."  
  
Spike saw something moving in the air that Angel was looking at with a open, horrified fear. Maybe a twist of light—or was it… was it a claw?  
  
"I'm sick of it! But it doesn't matter-- even if I can't hurt him myself—well, there are other ways. And I'll find them. I've got nothing but time. I'll destroy you, Angel-- you and him and Superbitch, too. I'll hunt you down, I'll set the hounds of hell on your heels and I'll make you hurt until you can feel just a tenth of what I've lost to you three. And believe me--"  
  
"Ah!" Spike exclaimed, breaking into the exchange, "I get what's this is about—bit of payback from old friends, is it?"  
  
Angel turned to look as the man stood up on shakey legs. But his eyes, his eyes were pure fire.  
  
"Well let me tell you-- you're nothing," he said, "You got no power where we won't give it. And I'm getting pretty sick of being tread on. So we'll fight you. Again."  
  
He walked, falteringly towards the disturbance in the air.  
  
"And what's more—we'll win. Consider it a friendly warning"  
  
It turned to look at Angel with Cordelia's face, and vanished.  
  
They were alone, again.  
  
---  
  
Spike planted a deft kick to the training pad, strapped to Charles' arm.  
  
Charles leapt back two paces on the mats in the newly constructed training room. The bright lights illuminated the floor with crisp efficiency.  
  
He changed positions, intent on the session. Spike struck again, one-two with carefully wrapped fists. And again, a carefully measured kick, with his full force.  
  
Charles lost his balance, landing on the ground. He grinned up at the man before him.  
  
"I'd hate to have known you when you had superpowers, man."  
  
Spike helped him up, raising his eyebrows, "Yeah, lots of people hated to know me then."  
  
"Want to try anything else— they've got some sweet new surprises for us in the weapon's room, they've been saying."  
  
"Something to be said for the joy of anticipation," Spike said, fingering his elbow gingerly, "Think I'll take a bit of a breather first."  
  
Charles gestured to Spike's arm. He'd had a few more scars, too, since he'd returned. Some things never heal entirely.  
  
"That still hurting you? Whatever it was that got into you—must've been nasty."  
  
"I'll live," he said, diverting the subject away, "Besides, I've got it on reasonable authority that chicks dig scars."  
  
"Hell, I should get beat up more often!"  
  
They were interrupted by the door swinging open. Angel, followed by Fred walking swiftly behind him. And a man he'd met some weeks earlier, briefly, who they called Wesley. When Fred saw him, walking towards them, she smiled to him brightly. He found himself particularly happy to see her, too, and was surprised to find himself smiling back.  
  
"We came to get Charles," Fred interjected, "There's this cult that's trying to use the combined energy of their souls to raise a—"  
  
"It's a job," Angel interrupted, walking directly up to Spike. He didn't look at the marks that remained, even after the bones had healed.  
  
They'd been talking. When he still had been staying at the Hyperion, Angel had arrived, randomly, and talked to him. Usually about nothing in particular—but sometimes about Cordelia. It was strange. But for all the strangeness, it hadn't , for some reason he couldn't name, felt uncomfortable. Perhaps family blood did run strong.  
  
When Angel had asked, tentatively, if he intended to go to Buffy, Spike had simply said that they'd had their day in the sun.  
  
"A job?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"I'm in."  
  
"You ready?"  
  
"Hell yes."  
  
"Allright," Angel replied, throwing him a lightweight axe he'd been holding to his side, and which Spike caught deftly, and continued as he turned to the door.  
  
"Let's get to work."  
  
--- 


End file.
